Artist Statement / Journal Entries

Artist Statement:ABSURDITY AS A SELF REFLECTIVE TOOL FOR CORRECTING THE BLINDNESS OF CONFORMITY WHILE SKIRTING THE FLAMES OF CHAOSFor me, the very essence and driving urge to create is embodied in the title captions. The image and its title are like music and lyrics working together invoking a waking dream. I use automatic imaging to explore the flow of unconscious material, stirring a depthless fog vat catching fragments as they appear. Using that process I pan for alchemical gold, the pure elixir, with its magical potential to bring forth the purity of knowing. Knowing as a state of knowing can become log jammed by what is known. What is known becomes the software, the operating program for subsequent behavior. Here a monotony induced stupor transposes life into a redundant, robotic behavioral pattern of lock stepped machine made dummies. Behavior is the last link in the chain of life lived out loud, and in most cases I wish it wasn’t. This is where absurdity does its best work - when life becomes a billboard, absurdity becomes a wrecking ball.There is a line for which absurdity can over run itself into the uselessness of chaos. I use absurdity as a twist showing different ways of seeing the given. The given always reestablishes itself over time and is useful until its not. That process is a cycle just like the cycle of harvest. Absurdity may seem like chaos, but it is only temporary until renewal is born from the fertile ground of its ashes. The opposite of chaos, and equally toxic, is the tendency toward fear driven redundancy. Absurdity by the nature of its detached philosophical freedom shines a light on fear driven redundancy exposing its toxic behavioral patterns. From that, new behavior is shamed into existence beginning the whole process all over again.

Journal Entry 7.21.18The shift in aspirations between general goals and the goal of emptiness (desiring desirelessness) is difficult. It is so because nothingness is not quantifiable. Goals exist because the core of existence has nothing, no purpose, no finality, so goals exist as a safety blanket. The safety (or baby blanket) offers the illusion that life has purpose (other than entertainment) and that purpose can be judged on a scale of value. Emptiness as a goal once "achieved" (achieved here means: all aspirations are thus forward known as empty) is empty, nothing. Empty or nothing can't be put in a bank, it falls outside the value scale illusion and can't be used as a crutch to bolster ego. What that (emptiness as a state of mind) offers in the realm of survival is a difficult question. There are several paths to take from the preceding thoughts, one is understanding doubt and gravity. Emptiness is hidden by doubt and the false supports generated in an effort to hide, ignore or run from doubt. Emptiness is to suspend doubt or live in doubtlessness. That state is odd. It seems odd, because it seems that it is like being lost. What is lost? What is lost is the illusion provided by the goal of purpose and once that is lost we are left with nothing. How can nothing be of higher value than the illusion of something? Illusion of purpose generates the illusionary gratification of being grounded in something. Being issusionary, it's gratification is temporary, setting up a "domino effect" of finding the next something to fill the weakening gratification of the previous something. That process becomes all consuming and never ending. That process pulls upon itself an eventual mountain of half tried, half forgotten, partially completed, yet to arrive ramifications of those things set in motion but left for other new ones....etc. That then becomes the mountain of existence, and that mountain wields a force upon us and that force we call responsibility. We are responsible for those somethings evoked That force of responsibility and it's ramifications cluster around us like a solid wall. That wall, being added on to from the moment the process started, is growing in density continually. It's density has the magnitude relative to it's power of personal identification. What that person "knows" themselves as, is the density of responsibility - that is also called personality. The personal road of accumulation is what that person is known as - his/her personal history. Once again that cluster has force binding one to it's history and it's expectations. How does that force differ from gravity? Journal Entry 10.16.18If we are using the mind of senses to define reality then it could be characterized as a sphere. That sphere of sense based reality only extends to the outer ranges of what is perceived. Beyond that, to the mind that is informed by sense based reality, either nothing exists or it is excepted (unconsciously) as unknown. What is currently occurring is sense based reality is expanding hugely by the advent of cyber information storage and transference. We, as sense based spheres of knowing, are growing aware of the fact that our sphere is expanding via the cyber realm (cyber sphere). That does not mean we have opened to the infinite mystery, it just means our sphere has greatly expanded. The emergence of the cyber sphere has generated great social instability as society moves from identification of sense based reality defining to enhanced (cyber) based reality defining. This is an epic defining shift in cultural identification. The cultural instability generates two types of response: 1) Terror and a retreat back more deeply into identification with lessor (smaller, more dense) spheres of knowing. 2) Embracing the challenge of expanding into the new cyber enhanced reality identification. Both responses can be characterized by their relationship to the notions of boundaries. In the first case we have a retreat more deeply into boundary building. In the second case we have a reduction in boundary division which allows expansion. Those that are afraid of expansion try to use fear to scare those who embrace expansion back into boundary cages. Those that fear expansion are more comfortable in the fixed boundary cages of outdated, worn out, sleep inducing behavioral models. Journal Entry 11.29.18Something I read pertaining to destiny related to Plato's Archetypes triggered these thoughts. How I imagine that somewhere all things have already occurred is in the idea that all things are evolving toward a simple state that exists within all things already. Variance in things or events exist on one level and on that level that will always be the case, but on another level what emerges apparent is the state of all things as one force. Patterns that are recognizable as such are low level expressions of the infinite. The ability to ride with random emergence is a far higher level of evolution than one that coaxes use from perceived pattern. In Sci/Fi films what distinguishes the hero is the one that rises to the level of rapid response to the unknown emergent. If a person relies upon models of patterned behavior in order to respond to occurrence, then it is a delayed response. Random emergence, as it progresses, becomes so random that it no longer moves on the level of perceptible movement - it can no longer be perceived. It is perception that nails the random occurrence to it's position of having occurred, it is a form of prediction. The need to predict shows a lower level skill in riding the random, it shows doubt in it's ability to harmonize with the unfolding unknown. Perception that nails pattern becomes reality. Ultimate randomness unifies in stasis; pattern is the decent away from unity. "Evolution" is the shedding of pattern or the embracing of random. Randomness on the level of stasis can't be perceived with the tools of perception we know. In order to perceive the level of random stasis or randomness at the level of stasis, the known tools of perception have to be shutdown. It is those known tools of perception that solidifies the random into stultified pattern. Journal Entry 12.6.18 Daily life may seem random up close, but if you get a bird's eye view of that same thing, patterns emerge. What does that suggest? What that does that suggest that by getting a larger view, the smaller view becomes patterned? It seems that as the larger view separates itself from what is viewed to the point where patterns emerge, it is moving more deeply into the random. How is that? Comparison is the process. In order to witness a difference between forms of organization a process of comparison is set up. The further one form is from another, the clearer the difference becomes. So, in order for a bird's eye view on the mundane to generate a patterned view, it must be an opposing view of distinguishing differentiation. The opposing view amplifies the difference in order to notice the difference. For patterns to emerge from what, up close, appears to be random, it must be witnessed from an opposing view, in this case a greater random, oppositional point of view. What does that suggest that a bird's eye view is a greater random view? Is a higher, wider or broader view a greater random view? Does that then mean that the act of "expanded consciousness" is a greater random view? Does that mean that heightened consciousness is a "higher" (more profound) state of mind because it is more random? Maybe the current times are becoming increasingly random due to a response reaction to the pattern tightening brought on by technology. If technology is generating a tighter cultural patterning, then the human response may be to go into a greater random state of behavior. If a random state of mind is a higher state of consciousness, then the pattern tightening imposed by technology is pushing human's response to a new higher evolutionary level. We are going random in order to go higher.